Ask Lemmy

Lot of good advice here on how to make good decisions and strategic choices to make a better life for yourself.

But, I'm here to give a different perspective. I'm going to retire soon and I've never had a sensible career plan in my life that lasted. I've bounced from opportunity to opportunity like a piece of driftwood in the surf. I've made my career choices based on what seemed like a good idea at the time. I've been a company director, I've been broke and (fortunately only technically) homeless and everywhere in between. I've had stressful jobs and easy-going jobs. All of which is to say that plans are good but sometimes winging it can work out too.

The other thing I will say is that while I've worked some shit jobs and some great jobs, I've always done a good job regardless. I've treated bosses, colleagues, and subordinates fairly and honestly. So those opportunities I mentioned a paragraph ago, they came because people I've worked with were happy to work with me again.

Look for this book, they probably have it at your local library.

"Discover What You Are Best At" by Linda Gail.

I was almost 30, out of work with an injury, when I learned about it. It's a series of self tests you can finish in half a day, and an index of jobs that use those skills. For example, a paramedic and a hair dresser both need good dexterity and good people skills. Totally different jobs but a similar skill set. Jobs are divided up by training needed.

It pointed me at a job I'd never considered.

If nothing else, it'll give you some ideas to ponder.

There is no picture on the box. The pieces are blank.. So draw an image on the box..

Visualize it and make at least one step in that direction each and every day. The pieces will then take on that image. Give that picture time to form.

Ask yourself, what does YOUR life want to be? Creative? Inventive? Adventurous? Domestic? Entreprenurial?

NGL, you don't really hit it as to what you want and who you are until you're 27 or so, then you'll find that by 35 you'll be stepping into your full potential. (It's Peak Skills time.)

Sort that first.. WHO you are. What you want, what you'll tolerate and more importantly, what you will NOT put up with, no fucking way fuckyouvery much.. (this is absolutely critical for mental and emotional well being)

Then give yourself time and be aware that tastes change as we get older, so be prepared to roll with a change if it comes to you.

Don't hang on a sunk cost - regardless if you spent a decade going in one direction and then you find that you've pivoted to another..

The effort you put in going in that first direction is experience that will only give you a base on which to move from..

There's a reason we have the phrase "well rounded" to refer to those with a wide range of skills, confidence and experience.

Everything is a benefit - whether it is a skill or just personal confidence.

Being a young adult, frankly, is a ball of suck.

My own life from 17 to 27 was a struggle with loneliness, self-doubt, financial hardship, and a ton of hard, ugly lessons.

It was ALSO a time of incredible fun, moments of pure joy and fierce companionship. And in all of that I learned a lot of confidence and fortitude. You will as well.

At 61 I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up, but I know what and who I am and have managed to find a niche that I fit into and expanded it into a profession.

Do I make the most money I could? Oh hell no.. However, I've got a super community of people around me - friends, family and co-workers and we all get along and care for and about each other and that is what I have found matters - in the long run - the most.

Network the hell out of your life with people you admire and whose work you respect. The rest, in time, falls into place.

I don't know how to explain it in terms that don't come off sounding drippy and trite to some..

You've got more potential than you realize. Focus on finding the things that bring you the most joy once you've sorted who you are and explore them to their fullest and see what comes from that. There's really no hard and fast rule, other than be flexible and open to change.

And NEVER hesitate to cut toxic people from your life. (speed dial that MF'er)

You got this.

Go to university. If you're broke, go to a local community college for the first two years, get good grades, then transfer to the best school you can get into and afford to finish your degree. Your local state uni is probably just fine for undergrad. Plan at least a terminal Masters degree though.

What do you value in life? What do you want?

Figure out what you want, and then go for it.

• If you want to make money, then be determined to focus on a career white-collar that will make you money. Get the education that you need for your career, and then work on the career.
• If you want to focus on relationships, then spend quality time with people as much as you can, build friendships, find love, start a family, etc. Meet people and do things as often as you can.
• If you want to be an artist, musician, chef, or any other crafts-person, then find ways maximize the time and energy that you spend on your craft. Start making things now, start hanging out with others who share your passion.
• If you want to do something meaningful, try to build a life around the idea of helping people, animals, or generally leaving the world a better place than it is toady. Volunteer, get licensed for social work, etc.
• Only worry about things that you can act on tomorrow. Worrying about things far in the past or future is nothing more than anxiety, and it's not helpful.

I don't think we can really plan our lives, and even trying to do so is probably a fool's errand because things rarely, if ever, go as planned. (Of course we all need to work and take care of things on a daily basis to make ends meet, and such...) But I think the best thing you can do for yourself during early adulthood is determine what you value most in life and what you want to do with your time on this Earth.

Likewise, do yourself a favor and internalize the idea that you don't need to do what other people want you to do or live anyone else's dreams. Everyone is going to have their own values and opinions about what you should be chasing in life, but chances are they they are not compatible with your way of thinking.

I think life is really about attempting to do whatever you want. Think about the Greek philosopher Diogenes and consider that you don't have to do anything at all if you don't want to...

Once you know what you want to do, then you can simply focus on taking the steps to needed to do that thing.

You really don't know what the future holds, so don't get bogged down planning too far ahead. Set yourself some achievable goals for the near future. It's ok to have some vague plans for the distant future, but keep in mind that there is a good chance that your future could look very different than what you imagine it might be.

Have 2 sets of goals, one set is measurable and achievable near term, this can be as simple as going to bed on time or doing one proper pushup or saving $5 this week. The other set of goals are for your dreams or ambitions, have something in mind worth fighting for, they don't have a set timeline and you may not ever reach them but if you do you've accomplished your life goals or set up the future so someone else can get there. The important part is to have the goals and start to figure our what steps you need to get there.
Don't feel guilty about just enjoying life, if you enjoy getting your guilty pleasure just drop the guilt part, that's not to say go ahead and spiral out of control but you are allowed to enjoy things that are within your reach.
People will offer to help you with stuff. fucking let them help you, people like to feel needed and feel better when they get to help you, stop feeling guilty about accepting help. you are letting them help so that they feel good about themselves and you might accidentally form bonds with other humans.
It is ok to be bored, healthy even. Do absolutely nothing once in a while, no music, no phone, no background noise. Just let your mind wander and decompress. I use my evening commute for this, except on science friday, imma learn about some shit on fridays, like how it is ok to be bored sometimes.

do absolutely everything you possibly can to protect your dental health

teeth do not grow back

whatever you're facing in life, facing it with dental issues is going to make it so so so much worse

& if you're already brushing twice a day and flossing once a day or anywhere close, be extremely proud of that and don't ever let anything make you give it up

no matter who you are or what you've done you deserve a healthy mouth

I haven't seen this mentioned yet so:

Do not allow yourself to be persuaded, pressured, or bullied into having kids (including by yourself) until you feel 100% ready and that it's 100% what you want. The days of "nobody feels ready for kids; just go for it and it'll all work out" are way over. (This was always survivor bias bullshit advice, but with recent trends re: cost of living, housing availability, job market, etc., this attitude is straight-up reckless.)

When you're young, even if you think you know what you're doing, you'll almost certainly make mistakes; having children makes moving through and moving on from those mistakes a hell of a lot harder. A sad number of folks I know in their 30s are stuck in places they no longer want to live having to regularly interact with people who ruined their lives because of their kids. Even when things go well, kids are a huge drain on your energy, finances, and ability to take advantage of new opportunities.

It might be scary feeling like there are too many options available to you right now, but being forced into a certain life path because you have kids is not a fun way to resolve that.

Turns out the puzzle is blank too and you get to draw whatever you like on the pieces you've assembled (crayons not included in the puzzle box). You don't even have to finish the puzzle. Just put together some pieces and call it a good year. Few more next year.

By now you're probably thinking something like: yeah that sounds nice and all, how about you give me some practical advice you old fuck that knows nothing about me or my life or what I'm going through.

My answer is you're right. I don't know.

What do you think your most urgent issues are? What do you think are some reasonable aspirations and first steps to take?

As an adult, all I can say is we don't know what we're doing either. And that's okay.

Remember that hobby you liked to do as a kid but either grew out of or moved out of home, whatever. Pick that thing back up. At the very least, it'll be a short term distraction. It could end up sticking for life, as well.

I'm in the midst of a potential lifelong bout of model train autism. It just escaped me for the past 15 years. It's back now, and I love working on it.

Everyone I know is struggling in life. It seems almost impossible to get anything good going. Take things one step at a time and try to find a good strategy for managing upkeep on whatever needs it. Focus on improving a single thing you can do in the short term. Outside of that, I’d strongly recommend getting a union job if you don’t have employment figured out yet. A stable income with good job security is much easier to plan around even if it seems like it isn’t enough money.

My degree is in philosophy I planned on law school but by the time I graduated I was all done with school for a while. There is not a plethora of jobs for philosophy majors so I joined the Army. While I’m no longer in uniform I still work for the Army have lived all over the world and will have a decent retirement.

What I did is not for everybody but it worked for me.

Keep keeping contact with your friends even if adulthood would separate you.

Take care of your teeth. Those are expensive and painful to fix.

Try to make a habit of stretching and exersising. Its hard to start older.

Generally when you are doing big decisions in life try to think if its good in the ling term.

If you feel anxious or unsure about yourself, dont worry. Everybody has doubts. You just get better hiding them with age.

Practise media literacity and try to read things from many different perspectives. Its easy to start demonising one side of any situation if everything you know comes from the other side.

A foreword: there is no picture. The future has guidelines, tendencies, but no actual shape. There's nothing you're supposed to do. Life isn't planned out all at once. Those days are dead. In fact, they nay never have existed. You will become a new person, and have a new career or focus or stage of life, about once every 11 years. That's normal. That's life's uncertainty.

The piece of advice is the one I've given on many platforms for years: if you're —

• North American and

• from any "settler-colonial" culture and

• you're able,

then leave North America for at least one year. Live elsewhere, see how others live, and break out of the bubble built by the preschool to prison pipeline, the corporate cradle to coffin collective consciousness. This advice isn't exclusively for Gringos and Canucks, but it's based on the particular starting square I had and most of the people I've encountered. Also, I don't mean to exclude my Indigenous, Mexican, Mexica, and other Latino brothers and sisters, but my understanding is that you've already got reality pushing the movement narrative.

If you're a a first-generation North American (like me), also build connections within your community. There is much work to be done to diversify these places and so many other new, and first-gens could use some support. Detachment from one another is what harms us most. The communities I've had outside of El Norte continue to feed me. Admittedly, the job I have and the hours I keep prevent community-building. I need to get back to it.

Finally, get smart about money. Find teachers, take meetings at banks, go to teachings at libraries. Study the jargon in your credit card agreements. Make investments in yourself and your future. I failed pretty spectacularly at this one.

As far how to choose WHAT to do with all your time, well, the only thing I'd advise is to be a crafty, insightful, decisive disruptor. Nothing else that I've seen works. Be the best there is at a small thing you do. Identify a critical mass for your work and work hard to get to the place where 15% of the people you talk to will say 'yes' to you. Gain your repeat customers, followers, students, and acolytes. You can do what want. The trick is to have people support you or believe in your doing it.

Just a digest of what Ive seen here so far:

don't get bogged down planning too far ahead. Set yourself some achievable goals for the near future.

This is good advice.

there is a good chance that your future could look very different than what you imagine it might be.

This is not advice, but true and warrants remembering because you can bend the future.

find a good strategy for managing upkeep on whatever needs it.

Many people forget that anything and everything you obtain and want to keep working will require maintenance. Machines, subject knowledge, relationships, tools, whatever — all need upkeep. Know your shit so you can keep your shit together.

Focus on improving a single thing you can do in the short term.

I'd add to this. Short term goals should not be ends in themselves unless they are for entertainment. If you're focusing on a short term goal, connect it to a long term goal.

get[ ] a union job if you don’t have employment figured out yet.

Unions can protect you. But, if you're looking for satisfaction, the job has to be what you want it to be. Or, take pleasure in the union connections. If neither of these feeds you, a union can't save you from yourself.

Anyway, you asked and I'm stuck in a waiting room.

Try to take things one step at a time. For the first step, prioritize what you need to do into a list, and then start at the top and work slowly downwards. But don't take on more than 2 or 3 things at once.

The prioritized list might look overwhelming and stress you out. But remember that you are taking an active, organized step towards getting things under control, and give yourself lots of credit and praise for doing that. And things might seem like they are going slowly, especially at first. But remember that you are making progress, even when it might seem like you aren't.

A decent first step is trying to figure out what the picture looks like.

What kind of job do you want? What kind of family do you want? What kind of place do you want to live? What hobbies or activities do you want to do? The picture will be blurry and that is ok.

From that, you can start to plan out what you need to do to make that picture. Do you need a certain education? Do you need to live in a certain part of the world? Do your goals match your drive? Are your goals reasonable?

And it is fine if your picture changes over time. It does for everyone. However, having a picture gives you something to plan against.

So I think maybe you're not old enough to remember motivating giraffe or poem for your sprog on reddit, but when life took me down a notch after finally "figuring it out", I had these words to help me through.

Essentially, plans are great but life will take you all sorts of directions. You don't need to figure it all out now. Just put a couple of those pieces down and then some more down later.

Also, if you like cute motivating messages: https://motivatinggiraffe.com/gallery/ I miss her so much :(

What are you excited about?

Live in the moment and find a job that you like. Don't do it for the money, you'll become miserable.

Obviously that does not mean you should study philosofy or something even more useless. No, you've gotta earn a living after all.

It's good to learn a trade for something that's always in demand, like plumbing or trucking. Even if the cool sounding office jobs get taken over by AI, you'll be able to apply for jobs that do still exist.

Start with the easy bits. Find anchor points you can build off of. If your puzzle doesn't have any easy corners, pick any identifiable reference point, try to understand roughly where it might fit in the completed puzzle. It's OK if you have to make some very broad guesses early on, you can figure out exactly how it fits in as you complete more of the puzzle.

Then, see what you can build around the piece or pieces you've identified. Try to build bridges between the anchor points, but keep in mind this may not be possible with the pieces you have. just keep looking for the pieces you need, and when you find them, see how they fit into the pieces you have. Try to construct a stable skeleton of the puzzle you are trying to solve that holds together on its own. Once you have a stable structure it becomes much easier, you can start to choose to fill in whichever gap you prefer, or whichever one you find the pieces for. Take care not to ignore entirely pieces you find that don't belong to the area you're currently working on. If you can place one piece of the puzzle it may lead to other pieces falling into place that you have been holding onto for a while.

While you're solving, keep an eye out for pieces that don't belong to the puzzle you're trying to put together. They get mixed together all the time. It may be hard to tell at first because all puzzle pieces tend to look as though they might fit together somehow, but sometimes they just don't. They may be beautiful and interesting puzzles in their own right, but if they can't fit you can't make them, and you may spend a lot of time trying to make them fit in vain. On the other hand, it is entirely possible to find a way to make to distinct puzzles fit together. This is both rare and, counter-intuitively, much more common than you might expect. The decision to try to integrate two different puzzles is a complex one and completely unique to the two puzzles in question, and there is no general advice as to what the "correct" decision is, you must trust your instincts. Sometimes you might get it wrong, and not realize it for a while.

While solving, it is important to step back at regular intervals and appreciate your work. This is especially important when doing modular puzzles because the puzzle is never really finished, you can just keep adding pieces on where they fit. It's important to enjoy the process of solving the puzzle, rather than save all the enjoyment for when it's finished, because almost all of your time is spent in the process, and those momentary flashes of having "solved" a puzzle are always just ephemeral flashes before you see the next bit of the puzzle that opens up before you.

A lot of people do puzzles in groups, some people do them on their own. I find it's easier to put together my own puzzles when I can talk about them with other people who are doing their own puzzles. I like sharing pieces with other people when I can, and I highly recommend it, just be careful of people asking for pieces that you really need for your own puzzle.

Occasionally pieces come apart or get lost entirely, which can be very sad, because the puzzle may never feel complete without those pieces. You may remember some of them fondly, you may wish to forget some of them ever existed. Some of them you will forget whether you wish it or no. Just don't let those wishes stop you from appreciating what you've been able to build, what pieces you still have, and what you might be able to do with them.

Try your best to learn to be okay when you're uncomfortable. Getting a handle on your emotions so you can be objective is huge. Shitty people are going to bother you, you'll feel like you dont know what you're doing, you'll have really frustrating days, you'll second guess your decisions, shit will just not go your way sometimes, you'll hate someone you work with/for, the world will be scary (socially, politically and generally) and you'll always wonder if you're doing the right thing. These are all anxieties that come with being an adult and no matter what you do, they will not disapear. Learn (through introspection, education and/or therapy) how to be okay when you're feeling uncomfortable/anxious/doomed. You'll be fine, just start patting yourself on the back for every little win and try not to beat yourself up too much for every loss, any size. You'll be okay.

Try finding a supportive and fulfilling community that helps you achieve your life goals. I've found this at my Unitarian Universalist (UU) church. UU's don't believe in a shared religious text, instead they have a core set of shared values. My church has people who identify as atheist, Christian, several types of pagan, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, etc. We celebrate religious holidays from all of them as well as secular holidays like Trans Day of Visibility and Earth day. The focus is on being together and trying to make the world a better place. There's active volunteer groups for hunger relief, housing support, the environment, and LGBTQ support. I also really like the music program. There's a handy website to find a congregation near you, many stream services on Zoom so you can test them out before going in person. They can vary a lot based on the members of each congregation.

Be kind to yourself.

Take a year "off" of "normal" life and commit to some charity work.

Life is what happens when you are planning. Pick a direction and start moving forward.

As a fellow young adult who feels like they’re still figuring out wtf is going on I’ve found having outlets is good. It’s certainly not as easy to have free time where you have the mental energy to engage with something even if you want to but spending time and commiserating with others or doing a hobby very casually is good. I definitely struggle with letting some of my hobbies that I used to be extremely competitive/highly skilled at decrease in importance and having my ability reduced slightly. I don’t think there’s really a 1 size fits all answer.

Life is all about planning and strategizing. If you're not thinking ahead, more importantly, not thinking through on some things, you'll always be struggling to figure it out.

The first mistake you're doing is asking for advice in general. Because you're not thinking deep in yourself in what matters to you and what you want to achieve from those things.